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In the midst of the religious ferment, foreign invasions, and internal political strife that beset Italy before the full effects of the Counter-Reformation, the powerful and humble alike turned to popular prophecy for guidance and solace. Ottavia Niccoli examines here the forms of these prophecies--including interpretations of natural disasters, abnormal births, floods, and planetary conjunctions--and gives examples of how they were transmitted from the lower classes to the elite through street singers, apocalyptic preachers, astrologers, and printers. By tracing the ongoing revision of the prophecies, Niccoli reveals them as an indication of how various levels of society viewed events of the time, as a form of propaganda for such causes as anti-Lutheranism, and as a reflection of the interaction between "high" and "low" culture. Based on popular leaflets, diaries, civic chronicles, and iconographic sources, this book explores the expression of a culture in which nature, religion, and politics formed a unified system with a uniform code of interpretation. It connects the decline of prophecy in Italy with the end of the Italian wars and the beginning of the Counter-Reformation, when popular preaching was banned and charismatic religion discouraged.
A pioneering text which covers the urban society of early modern Europe as a whole. Challenges the usual emphasis on regional diversity by stressing the extent to which cities across Europe shared a common urban civilization whose major features remained remarkably constant throughout the period. After outlining the physical, political, religious, economic and demographic parameters of urban life, the author vividly depicts the everyday routines of city life and shows how pitifully vulnerable city-dwellers were to disasters, epidemics, warfare and internal strife.
In the decades before the Civil War, English readers confronted an extensive and influential pamphlet literature. This literature addressed contemporary events in scathingly critical terms, was produced in enormous quantities and was devoured by the curious. Despite widespread contemporary interest and an enormous number of surviving copies, this literature has remained almost entirely unknown to scholars because it was circulated in handwriting rather than printed with movable type. Drawing from book history, the sociology of knowledge and the history of political thought, Noah Millstone provides the first systematic account of the production, circulation and reception of these manuscript pamphlets. By placing them in the context of social change, state formation, and the emergence of 'politic' expertise, Millstone uses the pamphlets to resolve one of the central problems of early Stuart history: how and why did the men and women of early seventeenth-century England come to see their world as political?
This is the first translation into English of Guicciardini's Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Written in the early 1520s by the author of the famous History of Italy, as well as a History of Florence and Political Maxims and Reflections, this dialogue presents what is arguably the most searching and comprehensive analysis of the politics of his times. Like Machiavelli, his contemporary and friend, Guicciardini rejects classical republican arguments in the name of the new political realism and acknowledges the important role of patronage and graft in contemporary politics and the illegitimacy of nearly all forms of political power. In this Dialogue he provides one of the clearest expositions of the term 'reason of state', which he was one of the first to employ and which he uses to justify the priority of state interest over private morality and religion.